Now that you've learned all of Glossika's core tools, we'll talk about how they fit together so you can make the best use of them.
At its core, Glossika serves to solve a few learning problems: we figure out what level you're at, assign you learning content slightly more difficult than that, and then employ spaced repetition algorithms to ensure all that content gets committed to your memory.
Our algorithms will do a lot of the heavy lifting for you. To make progress in your language, all you have to do is:
1. Log into Glossika each day
2. First, review the items Glossika has scheduled for review
3. After finishing reviews, learn new items
4. Listen carefully and repeat after the native speaker!
5. Use full-practice mode as much as possible
Now let's break down each of those points a bit more.
Log into Glossika each day
There's a lot that goes into learning a language, but as a beginner, the vast majority of your problems can be solved by time and exposure. Simply spending a lot of time with your target language will lead you to naturally pick up words, get a feel for how sentences go together, and how to use simpler grammar points.
To that end, consistency is key.
We recommend doing short sessions periodically throughout your day.(Multiple short sessions are better for your memory than one long one!) This might seem difficult at first, but it only takes 8–10 minutes to finish a Glossika session. If you look, you'll likely find opportunities to turn downtime into learning opportunities.
Start each day with your reviews
We'll be blunt: Glossika will not work if you are not doing your reviews.
We forget things at relatively predictable intervals, and one of our UX struggles is figuring out how we can encourage users to review more often. The majority of people do not review enough. (And this is a big part of why you might be disappointed with your progress in other apps).
You should be reviewing more sentences than you are learning each day — a ratio of 10 review cards to 1 new card is about right. The exact amount of reviews you'll do will vary from day to day, but Glossika will figure all of that out for you. All you have to do learn is click the button and follow our algorithm's guidance.
Do one "new" session per day
We recommend doing only one "new" session per day — at least for the first month you use Glossika.
This will likely feel slow. You're excited to learn, you've just found this fancy new tool, and you want to get serious with your studies now! The thing is, every new item you learn will turn into 15–20 reviews over the course of the coming year. If you jump the gun and start doing 50 new sentences per day now, you'll wind up with 500–600 daily review cards a month from now, and that's enough to overwhelm anyone.
To find your "sweet spot", we recommend:
1. Start off by doing one new session per day, and all of your reviews
2. If you complete all of your reviews daily for 2 weeks, start doing 2 sessions per day
3. If you keep up with the new pace for 2 more weeks, start doing 3 sessions per day
4. Etc
Stop adding new items once you reach a point where you begin failing to complete your review and new items more than once per week. For your current time commitment to Glossika, this is the limit of your productivity.
Further reading: Mini Habits: A more reliable way to build good habits
Listen carefully and repeat after the native speaker
In training sessions, you’ll hear your base (native) language first by default. Next, you'll hear your target language. We refer to this A --> B succession as a "sentence pair". In a typical "new" session you'll do 5 repetitions of each of 5 sentence pairs for a total of 25 reps; in a typical "review" session you'll do a single repetition of 25 different sentence pairs.
During these sessions, you should:
Listen to the target language carefully. Where does the native speaker's voice rise and fall? What is the rhythm of their words? Which sounds do or don't get connected? Can you make out the music of their words?
Repeat back what you hear as closely as possible, focusing on pronunciation, flow, and tone.
Don't stress too much. It’s okay if all you can do is mumble not-quite-perfectly along right now. You're going to see all of these sentences multiple times, after all. The more mumbling you do now, the better you’ll get. Before long, the sentences will be rolling right off your tongue even without a recording to listen to.
For now, use full-practice mode as much as possible
Glossika currently offers two different learning modes: full-practice and listening-only. For beginners, we recommend using full-practice mode as much as possible. This mode was designed to ensure that you actively engage with Glossika's content. We believe that passive listening (treating audio merely as background static; not particularly understood and mostly ignored) is a waste of time.
As you improve your language and/or supplement your learning with other resources, you may find that a different routine than the one we've described above works best for you. That's great! We encourage you to take command of your own learning.
For example:
If you're working through a textbook, maybe you want to go through the sentences a little slower, to analyze the grammatical structures you've been learning
If you read a ton and thus get a lot of exposure to your target language, you might prefer to use Glossika specifically as a tool for listening comprehension
If you live in-country or have regular opportunities to use your target language, perhaps you'll use Glossika more as a supplement that simply refreshes your memory and drills you on the "proper" way of expressing a variety of thoughts
If you spend a lot of time on the go, the listening-only mode might be especially valuable to you: instead of listening to music or watching YouTube, you can transform your commutes into learning opportunities
Whatever you ultimately end up doing, just be sure to know why you're doing it like that. If you aren't sure what to do, then fall back on these best practices.